Eye on the Watcher’s Council

Dave SchulerSeptember 26, 2007

As you may know the members of the Watcher’s Council each nominate one of his or her own posts and one non-Council post for consideration by the whole Council. The complete list of this week’s Council nominations is here.

I agree with Hube on the Jena 6 matter: the actual events seem to have been distorted to foment a racial crisis. There does appear to be a case of racially-motivated unequal treatment with respect to the young thugs who assaulted another student. The solution to that is genuine justice and fair sentencing not a Get Out of Jail Free card.

Soccer Dad covers the coverage of the Israeli strike against a Syrian facility on September 6 and finds the coverage wanting. I’m with Pat Lang on this: I want to know more before reaching a conclusion. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look as though I’m likely to get that from the American press who appear already to have decided on the story before they’re in possession of the facts.

In my submission for this week I provide an alternative explanation for the lack of growth of median income in United States to the ones presented by Paul Krugman and Tyler Cowen. The reasons are important because policies that don’t take them into account are unlikely to achieve the desired results. What’s worse they’ll have all sorts of undesireable secondary effects.

Bloggers, journalists, and scholars have all written on the Jewish lobby in Washington, DC. Freedom Fighter notes that there’s an Arab lobby, too. I think it’s also worth mentioning that university Arabic languages and culture programs, at least in the U. S., have engaged in a certain sort of quality control for decades to ensure that those most likely to entertain the prevailing model are in the best position to promote it.

Greg comments on a Paul Krugman column resurrecting the evergreen Republicans are racists. My view is that this is a charge that Republicans left themselves open to when they accepted the Dixiecrats from the early 1970’s through the 1980’s in pursuit of their majority. I won’t go so far as to say that Republicans courted them but that they accepted them into the party is a matter of historical record.

EdWonk quotes an editorial on educational reform at length. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: we need to decide what the purpose of the public schools is—way of employing adults, method of imparting basic skills to children, job training centers, consciousness-raising centers for political radicalization, and so on. We can achieve some of those objectives but not all of them.

Dafydd ab Hugh comments on issuing visas to people from countries that sponsor terrorism. In this day in which multiple citizenships and passports are so common I think that it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to expend extra energy worrying about people from specific countries—they’ll just come in on passports from another country. I do think that we should admit no more visa holders than we’re prepared to administer. That by itself would require a radical departure in practice and policy from the status quo.